Game is nice, but not great. Multiple bugs will make you lose a lot fun from just play. Graphic is nice and thats mayor improvement to MMO2. I like also that research tree is connected with other researches so you just cant max one path. Battle in real time with active pause would be nice, but its bugged. Orders given in those fights usually arent followed. Also way to small battlefield block almost all tactic. You also dont have shields on different sides, only one for whole ship, so turning around is useless. Also you cant board other ships or battle stations, so basically all fights is all about have enough fire power to get pass shields of enemy and have strong enough shields to survive his wave of attack. Also its quite hard to keep control over ships, as they will do whatever they wish, even if you turn admiral, and try to control whole micromanagement. You just cant, as ships will do whatever they want. Anyway you can travel to other places, but sometimes you will be attacked without warning by other races and it wont trigger war. But when you try to do same to ships that wonders off to your terrain it will start war immediately. And when diplomacy is broken, after war start you just cant talk with person you are war with. You have to finish war with elimination of nation. You just cant spare poor guy, as no diplomacy is allowed. Sometimes enemy can ask you to end war but its quite rare. Economic is quite simple. You just make sure you have enough population to pay taxes. In late game money wont be any problem. Hard part is only at start. Later when you have multiple small planets with many buildings, you will have some problems with money, but later it change quite quick. Coz you can terraform almost everything then you can make paradises everywere. To sum it up: pros: graphic, tech tree, a little bit like MMO2, got it for free cons: multiple bugs, terrible battlefield, to simple economy, screw up diplomacy and many more
Its very nice game, very simple in graphic, units, ideology, but complex enough to make you think what you do. Single player game is quite nice and challenging, but when you finish campaign and try to play skirmish you see that even best ai is very dumb and after first wave of attacks game become way to easy. Multiplayer is hard to check, because after few tries never found a single person to play against. I got it with 90% discount and it gave me few hours of good gameplay. Too bad i can't get more with some challenge.
